Editor’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series on reconstruction in Afghanistan. Part I appeared on May 8.

GHARABAGH, Afghanistan — In rural Afghanistan, the sight of Americans always draws a crowd.

As a provincial reconstruction team — consisting of civil affairs and a security detail — departs Kohsan, half the town seems to be out. Many people, especially the kids, raise a friendly hand.

“I like the waves better than the dead stares,” says Spc. Justin Johnston.

The second morning of a four-day trip through the northwest corner of Afghanistan begins with the six-vehicle convoy pointed north. The Iranian border is to the left; Turkmenistan is straight ahead, but still a ways off.

Gharabagh, the administrative seat of Gulran District, is the last objective of the day. For much of this leg, the terrain is desertlike, and soon the caravan nears Bay Mohammed, a place of mud huts and dome roofs.

“This is straight from the Bible,” says Johnston, one of seven soldiers providing security for the PRT. All seven are members of the 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon, Company D, 2nd Battalion, 135th Infantry Regiment. The unit is part of the Minnesota National Guard; the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Tim Cook, hails from Harrisburg, S.D.

The rest of the security detail consists of Spc. Brian Koziolek, Spc. Joshua Madson, Spc. Mike Nelson, Spc. Joshua Pasche and Pfc. Christopher Dordal. Staff Sgt. Steve Abbott, of Long Beach, Calif., is the medic.

During the trip they’ll complain, moan and joke around, like soldiers do, but they get the job done.

“I would say most people like to go out on convoy operations,” Cook says during a break later in the trip. “It makes the time go faster, and it’s a little more fun and exciting.”

Mullah Jabar, the religious leader of Bay Mohammed, steps forward to greet the visitors. It doesn’t take long for a crowd to gather.

“Crowds can be bad, especially when there are guns,” Cook says, “but you usually don’t see guns in the smaller villages.”

Maj. Sam Agag, the trip leader, asks the typical questions: Who lives here? Do you have a school? Health clinics? He asks about crime.

“People are poor here,” Jabar says to the team’s interpreter, Abdul Qadeer Kazemi. “There’s nothing to rob. It’s the most secure town in Afghanistan.”

The journey continues through a barren, pebbled landscape void of any significant vegetation. Loose sand skitters wildly across the unpaved road. In these parts, locals say, the winds blow hard six months out of year.

Down the road the arid landscape evolves some more, this time into rolling hills and steep ravines. The route is now quite bumpy, and vehicle occupants sway from side to side, up and down like a jack-in-the-box.

Around a series of hillocks the convoy rolls to a stop before a large village about the size of Bay Mohammed. The only difference is that it looks utterly deserted. Then a head pops up from behind a paneless window.

This is Sharband village, but it resembles a ghost town. A few robed bodies appear. The men shout when they speak, as if trying to talk over a loud generator.

“You are the first visitors,” says Toorjan Noorzai, the leader of the group.

For the next half hour, they recounted a story that’s not at all pleasant. Ismail Khan, one of the most revered men in western Afghanistan, is loathed in this village. The men, who are Pashtun, told how 30 heavily armed Khan supporters forcibly evicted thousands of people at gunpoint.

Six months ago, 500 families lived in Sharband. Now there are only six.

About a dozen years ago, the tribe entered the area. The land wasn’t theirs, but in early 2004 they pooled their money to buy the land under their feet. Several months later, Khan and his arch nemesis in the west, Amanollah Khan, resumed their feud south of Herat.

At first, Ismail Khan’s people came and said all was fine. But once hostilities ceased, the posse returned to run them out of town. Homes were damaged, wells wrecked. They forced a sum of money on the villagers, telling them to take the roughly $36,000 and leave.

“They said: ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t take your money,’” recalls Sarkark, an elder who goes by a single name, as many Afghan males do.

At gunpoint, they took the money and split the proceeds. In the coming days nearly all the families scattered. Because it was the hottest time of the year, some refugees died along the way, the young and old, in particular.

“Four of my children died,” Sarkark says. “They were very bad to us.”

Agag tells the villagers to stay put, promising to get authorities involved.

Through it all, the wind eerily wailed. It was as if all of the departed residents were weighing in on the matter.

The team’s next stop is a small health clinic serving nomads and villagers in the outlying areas of Gulran District.

The district governor, Al-Haj Mohammedjan Wakil Zadeh, sits at a well-worn executive desk in his office, at times fidgeting with a yellow, wooden ruler. Except for a small Afghan flag and a vase of fake flowers, not much else is on his desktop.

The three-sided room opens through a threshold into an adjoining room, where a couple of men soon congregate to pray.

Hanging on a wall is a rug that bears the likeness of the late Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. On another wall is a message that, when translated, reads: “If we are not honest and we don’t have an open mind, how can we be a just society.”

One of the men in the room runs the district’s census office. His name is Jawan Shirjan. He claims people in town are so healthy they defy the laws of reproduction.

“Before, women became pregnant once a year,” Shirjan says, “and now it’s twice a year.”

That leads to hearty laughter. Navy Cmdr. Kim Evans, who heads the PRT in Herat, shakes her head.

Agag and Evans get down to business. They tell the leaders that a project has been approved to build a school for men to learn to read and write. The building can also double as a community hall.

But there’s a catch: the leaders must hire local unskilled laborers. The jobs will provide money to those who need it most, the Americans say.

That leads to an extended conversation about education and security.

“It takes months to build a school,” Agag says, “but only minutes to destroy it.”

Agag, who has spent three years in country and 18 years in the Middle East, then impresses them by citing verses and themes from the Quran. The men nod in agreement, clearly taken by his grasp of their world.